13 ms·

Someone Stole My Book (and My Job) and Is Selling It on Amazon

315 points by artsandsci 9y ago

JPLeRouzic 9y ago
Another way to deal with the situation is to sell the book from the ExtremTech web site. The drawbacks are: 1. Lack of the huge audience that Amazon have 2. Lack of low cost transport costs The first point is not really valuable anyway as there are lot of junk books on Amazon that come from Createspace. Usually it is books written in the XIXcentury but with a title that suggests they were written recently. Amazon would really improve the value of its brand if it would remove this useless kind of books.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  > Another way to deal with the situation is to sell the book from the ExtremTech web site. What problem does that solve?
  - JPLeRouzic 9y ago
    The stealer is most probably without enough resources to deal with complex situations. Let makes the cost to replicate higher for him. If the book is not visible on Amazon, no ranking will be available, and no e-book version will be easy to find. - Without ranking there is virtually no risk it will be targeted. - Without e-book version, it will be more difficult to copy. That said there are other ways to trick a Createspace author. For example many Createspace books are sold by independant sellers at a much higher price than the original, if there is a sell then the independant seller buy the original one and sell it to the customer, while making an easy benefit completely legally.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  The real market depends on the percentage of potentially interested readers multiplied by some factor that approximates ease of discovery. Ease of discovery on Amazon is extremely low if you're not a top-hundred seller, selling into a high-turnover genre, or have an effective marketing campaign. So for niche titles it can be more effective to sell direct to a niche audience from a niche site than to put the book up on Amazon and hope someone notices it.
  - JPLeRouzic 9y ago
    Yes that was I had in mind but you state it much more clearly. Thanks.
teeray 9y ago
Couldn't the author hand Amazon a DMCA takedown?
jhallenworld 9y ago
I indirectly know of someone who makes extra money by plagiarizing little known books, changing the cover and republishing them on Amazon. I'm surprised Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism. Remember Google's digitize all books project? This would be a useful use-case for it.
- jbigelow76 9y ago
  * I'm surprised Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism.* There's no incentive to create such a system (I'll be optimistic and assume Amazon doesn't actually have said system yet) until you're held accountable for infractions arising from lack of possession of such a system.
- mabbo 9y ago
  When I was an Amazon intern 7 years ago, I went to a presentation of exactly how the duplicate detector works. I won't discuss any technical details of course, but suffice it to say: it should catch these sorts of cases, so long as the books are already on Amazon in digital format. I don't understand how your friend can get away with this.
  - berg01 9y ago
    The only logical conclusion (apart from Amazon being managerially incompetent) is that they make more money this way.
    - mabbo 9y ago
      "Only" is a strong word. There could be dozens of other reasons. It could be that the system isn't working the way it's designed. It could be that the thieving authors have found a trick to fool the system. It could be that there's a single nefarious admin who takes bribes to override the system. I'll bet you can even think of a few more if you try. Amazon thinks long term. Bezos's influence is all about that. Letting customers and authors alike be defrauded like this in order to make a few extra bucks in the short term is not what I expect from Amazon.
jostmey 9y ago
This a major problem for amazon. I bought a baby product off amazon. I noticed a few weird things about my product, so I emailed the inventor. They told me that some Chinese company had stolen their product design and was seeling fakes with the same name on amazon. I refuse anything from amazon for my baby. Hell, amazon even sent me an opened package of similac formula
- martin-adams 9y ago
  I had a fake blender from Amazon and they first were helpful then suddenly wanted me to return it to the reseller allowing them to sell it to someone else. I only discovered it after a BBC report of fake ones catching fire. No way would I let that end up in someone else’s house. Got my refund in the end, but Amazon were clueless really.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    You are starting to freak me out. I have bought a few brand name items from Amazon over last years where the quality was surprisingly bad. Now I wonder if they were fake. This just shouldn't happen. It's one thing to find out that something is fake but often you don't know what to expect and end up thinking that the product is just bad. I guess I will reduce my Amazon shopping when more. I already dropped prime but I will probably start avoid Amazon as much as I can from now on. eBay feels almost more honest now.
    - swozey 9y ago
      Are you buying GOOD brand names? BIFL stuff? I could name a ton of brand name items I've bought off Amazon that were just bad that I replaced multiple times. A big problem with that is not seeing it in person to see what comes with it, etc. Example, I've owned just about every brand of electric shaver and hated something about nearly all of them. I finally dropped the $70 on a Wahl that has a third of the features but it's a beast. Couldn't even tell you how many kitchen appliances I have bought and thought were awful. Or bathroom mats, towels, patio mats, etc. Personally I think a lot of consumer products just suck and Amazon is pretty much the equivalent of Walmart now when it comes to filtering through cheap crap. Products are half-assed most of the time and companies spend more money on marketing than making a good product (or the best they can for the price). Or they focus on one really big feature and skimp out on the rest. I'm trying to buy a lot LESS but very high quality stuff nowadays. I've had to stop using Amazon as my "buy-all" place. Almost felt like I was being gaslit by 5 star reviewers of shitty towels/etc when I finally discovered Frontage products and went "wow, lux Hotel quality towels DO exist." I don't want to use Amazon for cheap Walmart quality junk, I want it for its fast shipping and options. edit: Frontgate not Frontage.. they make killer towels, I'm a changed man
13of40 9y ago
In the (sadly, increasingly rare) cases that I need to look something up in the book I wrote, I typically hit Google and find that one site in Vietnam that has the pirated copy...
- Mononokay 9y ago
  Upload it to Libgen! More information's always better, especially if even the author isn't getting it legally.
  - jhallenworld 9y ago
    Libgen is useful and should figure out how to be legitimate. They could go down the youtube route: sell subscriptions or include ads and just pay the copyright holders royalties.
    - saint_fiasco 9y ago
      Even Google Books couldn't pull that off. Publishers believe, maybe correctly, that a youtube for books would destroy their business.
      - ericd 9y ago
        You might be interested to read about what happened with that, I was pretty surprised when I read the full story. Basically, publishers started off by suing Google, until they realized that it would probably generate a lot of new revenue for sales on books that were out of print, and that weren't currently generating money. With that in mind, they continued in their lawsuit, but started trying to use the lawsuit as a way to help Google instead of stop them - by using the mechanics of the class action suit, they could default opt in all authors, with the onus being on the authors to opt out, and then they would settle with Google for a nominal amount, thereby getting the permission of all the authors of those out of print works to be included in Google Books without going through the nearly impossible task of getting each author's explicit permission to participate. This was looking like a great legal hack until Amazon and Microsoft complained to the Federal government (the FTC IIRC) that it would be unfair if this was allowed to happen, because only Google would get this permission. So, counterintuitively, it wasn't really the publishers that stopped Google Books.
5_minutes 9y ago
The problem is that Amazon just doesnt care about things like these. Remember long it took them to fix their broken rating system? And it’s still not fixed, it’s just “less broken”. Though quite vital for people’s shopping experience
- hangonhn 9y ago
  Not sure if you know about this but I use this whenever i shop on Amazon now: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ Amazon should just find some change and buy this company and integrate them.
- cholantesh 9y ago
  Any info on this? I pretty much just go by friends' recommendations now. So many times review I read were noise, eg: "The film is excellent; I can't comment on this edition" or "I haven't used it yet but the package is very expensive"
akeck 9y ago
Amazon should buy Turnitin.
billysielu 9y ago
I thought fake stuff on Amazon was money laundering?
sqldba 9y ago
I felt sorry for the author. But then I reached the bottom of the article and see that site has that most awful and obnoxious banner advertising there. Now I don’t feel bad.
mfrisbie 9y ago
Exact same thing happened to me, I documented the entire experience: https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-book-on-amazon-23631624aca2 https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-bo...
- aptwebapps 9y ago
  Did Amazon end up taking action in the end?
sehugg 9y ago
One of my Kindle books was rejected for unspecified reasons. I’ll have to check to see if a plagiarist got there first. FWIW I’ve moved recent ebooks to Gumroad PDF downloads.
jinfiesto 9y ago
Amazon's co-mingling causes so many issues. I'm really into board games and would love to be able to rely on my Prime subscription to pick up new games (and get them quickly.) The board game market is kind of perverse in its own way in that publishers often do not publish enough to meet demand and supply gets snapped up in the first couple days/weeks of release and prices skyrocket on account of scalping. Because of this there's a huge glut of counterfeit games on Amazon. Even worse, sellers also pretty clearly are also selling damaged "new" product at full price. I've received $100+ board games that were clearly damaged before they were shipped. It's a huge PITA when you can't even exchange since the game you wanted has gone out of print between when you ordered and when you received. I would love to shop local, but my personal collection exceeds the stock of most FLGS's in size and they very rarely stock things I want at prices that are reasonable. I've mostly switched to buying from coolstuff unless I'm buying a game that's evergreen (that I somehow don't already have.) Amazon needs to sort their inventory out.
Khaine 9y ago
It is borderline criminal. If they were not such a large organisation they would be charged with facilitation. They are knowingly allowing the sale of counterfeit goods. You go down to a street corner and sell knock-off Prada bags and you will be arrested. You let someone sell counterfeit goods from your store and you are an accessory. This will only change when Amazon are held accountable.
nkkollaw 9y ago
Will they take the product down if you can prove it's stolen..?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
herodotus 9y ago
Knowingly selling stolen goods is not new to the law. In California, selling a stolen item worth less than $500 is a misdemeanour, and carries a maximum penalty of 1 year in prison. I think that if the owner of Amazon were jailed for 1 year (assuming that Amazon is indeed knowingly selling stolen property), then we might see a drastic improvement in how Amazon deals with all sorts of shady sales on their websites.
Laura_McPherson 9y ago
If you think your spouse may be cheating, you can contact phonespyapps01@gmail.com He’s a real hacker and was very reliable in helping me spy on my cheating husband’s cell phone remotely.

315 points by artsandsci 9y ago

Another way to deal with the situation is to sell the book from the ExtremTech web site. The drawbacks are: 1. Lack of the huge audience that Amazon have 2. Lack of low cost transport costs The first point is not really valuable anyway as there are lot of junk books on Amazon that come from Createspace. Usually it is books written in the XIXcentury but with a title that suggests they were written recently. Amazon would really improve the value of its brand if it would remove this useless kind of books.

shkkmo 9y ago
> Another way to deal with the situation is to sell the book from the ExtremTech web site. What problem does that solve?
- JPLeRouzic 9y ago
  The stealer is most probably without enough resources to deal with complex situations. Let makes the cost to replicate higher for him. If the book is not visible on Amazon, no ranking will be available, and no e-book version will be easy to find. - Without ranking there is virtually no risk it will be targeted. - Without e-book version, it will be more difficult to copy. That said there are other ways to trick a Createspace author. For example many Createspace books are sold by independant sellers at a much higher price than the original, if there is a sell then the independant seller buy the original one and sell it to the customer, while making an easy benefit completely legally.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
The real market depends on the percentage of potentially interested readers multiplied by some factor that approximates ease of discovery. Ease of discovery on Amazon is extremely low if you're not a top-hundred seller, selling into a high-turnover genre, or have an effective marketing campaign. So for niche titles it can be more effective to sell direct to a niche audience from a niche site than to put the book up on Amazon and hope someone notices it.
- JPLeRouzic 9y ago
  Yes that was I had in mind but you state it much more clearly. Thanks.

teeray 9y ago

Couldn't the author hand Amazon a DMCA takedown?

jhallenworld 9y ago

I indirectly know of someone who makes extra money by plagiarizing little known books, changing the cover and republishing them on Amazon. I'm surprised Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism. Remember Google's digitize all books project? This would be a useful use-case for it.

jbigelow76 9y ago
* I'm surprised Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism.* There's no incentive to create such a system (I'll be optimistic and assume Amazon doesn't actually have said system yet) until you're held accountable for infractions arising from lack of possession of such a system.
mabbo 9y ago
When I was an Amazon intern 7 years ago, I went to a presentation of exactly how the duplicate detector works. I won't discuss any technical details of course, but suffice it to say: it should catch these sorts of cases, so long as the books are already on Amazon in digital format. I don't understand how your friend can get away with this.
- berg01 9y ago
  The only logical conclusion (apart from Amazon being managerially incompetent) is that they make more money this way.
  - mabbo 9y ago
    "Only" is a strong word. There could be dozens of other reasons. It could be that the system isn't working the way it's designed. It could be that the thieving authors have found a trick to fool the system. It could be that there's a single nefarious admin who takes bribes to override the system. I'll bet you can even think of a few more if you try. Amazon thinks long term. Bezos's influence is all about that. Letting customers and authors alike be defrauded like this in order to make a few extra bucks in the short term is not what I expect from Amazon.

jostmey 9y ago

This a major problem for amazon. I bought a baby product off amazon. I noticed a few weird things about my product, so I emailed the inventor. They told me that some Chinese company had stolen their product design and was seeling fakes with the same name on amazon. I refuse anything from amazon for my baby. Hell, amazon even sent me an opened package of similac formula

martin-adams 9y ago
I had a fake blender from Amazon and they first were helpful then suddenly wanted me to return it to the reseller allowing them to sell it to someone else. I only discovered it after a BBC report of fake ones catching fire. No way would I let that end up in someone else’s house. Got my refund in the end, but Amazon were clueless really.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  You are starting to freak me out. I have bought a few brand name items from Amazon over last years where the quality was surprisingly bad. Now I wonder if they were fake. This just shouldn't happen. It's one thing to find out that something is fake but often you don't know what to expect and end up thinking that the product is just bad. I guess I will reduce my Amazon shopping when more. I already dropped prime but I will probably start avoid Amazon as much as I can from now on. eBay feels almost more honest now.
  - swozey 9y ago
    Are you buying GOOD brand names? BIFL stuff? I could name a ton of brand name items I've bought off Amazon that were just bad that I replaced multiple times. A big problem with that is not seeing it in person to see what comes with it, etc. Example, I've owned just about every brand of electric shaver and hated something about nearly all of them. I finally dropped the $70 on a Wahl that has a third of the features but it's a beast. Couldn't even tell you how many kitchen appliances I have bought and thought were awful. Or bathroom mats, towels, patio mats, etc. Personally I think a lot of consumer products just suck and Amazon is pretty much the equivalent of Walmart now when it comes to filtering through cheap crap. Products are half-assed most of the time and companies spend more money on marketing than making a good product (or the best they can for the price). Or they focus on one really big feature and skimp out on the rest. I'm trying to buy a lot LESS but very high quality stuff nowadays. I've had to stop using Amazon as my "buy-all" place. Almost felt like I was being gaslit by 5 star reviewers of shitty towels/etc when I finally discovered Frontage products and went "wow, lux Hotel quality towels DO exist." I don't want to use Amazon for cheap Walmart quality junk, I want it for its fast shipping and options. edit: Frontgate not Frontage.. they make killer towels, I'm a changed man

13of40 9y ago

In the (sadly, increasingly rare) cases that I need to look something up in the book I wrote, I typically hit Google and find that one site in Vietnam that has the pirated copy...

Mononokay 9y ago
Upload it to Libgen! More information's always better, especially if even the author isn't getting it legally.
- jhallenworld 9y ago
  Libgen is useful and should figure out how to be legitimate. They could go down the youtube route: sell subscriptions or include ads and just pay the copyright holders royalties.
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    Even Google Books couldn't pull that off. Publishers believe, maybe correctly, that a youtube for books would destroy their business.
    - ericd 9y ago
      You might be interested to read about what happened with that, I was pretty surprised when I read the full story. Basically, publishers started off by suing Google, until they realized that it would probably generate a lot of new revenue for sales on books that were out of print, and that weren't currently generating money. With that in mind, they continued in their lawsuit, but started trying to use the lawsuit as a way to help Google instead of stop them - by using the mechanics of the class action suit, they could default opt in all authors, with the onus being on the authors to opt out, and then they would settle with Google for a nominal amount, thereby getting the permission of all the authors of those out of print works to be included in Google Books without going through the nearly impossible task of getting each author's explicit permission to participate. This was looking like a great legal hack until Amazon and Microsoft complained to the Federal government (the FTC IIRC) that it would be unfair if this was allowed to happen, because only Google would get this permission. So, counterintuitively, it wasn't really the publishers that stopped Google Books.

5_minutes 9y ago

The problem is that Amazon just doesnt care about things like these. Remember long it took them to fix their broken rating system? And it’s still not fixed, it’s just “less broken”. Though quite vital for people’s shopping experience

hangonhn 9y ago
Not sure if you know about this but I use this whenever i shop on Amazon now: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ Amazon should just find some change and buy this company and integrate them.
cholantesh 9y ago
Any info on this? I pretty much just go by friends' recommendations now. So many times review I read were noise, eg: "The film is excellent; I can't comment on this edition" or "I haven't used it yet but the package is very expensive"

akeck 9y ago

Amazon should buy Turnitin.

billysielu 9y ago

I thought fake stuff on Amazon was money laundering?

sqldba 9y ago

I felt sorry for the author. But then I reached the bottom of the article and see that site has that most awful and obnoxious banner advertising there. Now I don’t feel bad.

mfrisbie 9y ago

Exact same thing happened to me, I documented the entire experience: https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-book-on-amazon-23631624aca2 https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-bo...

aptwebapps 9y ago
Did Amazon end up taking action in the end?

sehugg 9y ago

One of my Kindle books was rejected for unspecified reasons. I’ll have to check to see if a plagiarist got there first. FWIW I’ve moved recent ebooks to Gumroad PDF downloads.

jinfiesto 9y ago

Amazon's co-mingling causes so many issues. I'm really into board games and would love to be able to rely on my Prime subscription to pick up new games (and get them quickly.) The board game market is kind of perverse in its own way in that publishers often do not publish enough to meet demand and supply gets snapped up in the first couple days/weeks of release and prices skyrocket on account of scalping. Because of this there's a huge glut of counterfeit games on Amazon. Even worse, sellers also pretty clearly are also selling damaged "new" product at full price. I've received $100+ board games that were clearly damaged before they were shipped. It's a huge PITA when you can't even exchange since the game you wanted has gone out of print between when you ordered and when you received. I would love to shop local, but my personal collection exceeds the stock of most FLGS's in size and they very rarely stock things I want at prices that are reasonable. I've mostly switched to buying from coolstuff unless I'm buying a game that's evergreen (that I somehow don't already have.) Amazon needs to sort their inventory out.

Khaine 9y ago

It is borderline criminal. If they were not such a large organisation they would be charged with facilitation. They are knowingly allowing the sale of counterfeit goods. You go down to a street corner and sell knock-off Prada bags and you will be arrested. You let someone sell counterfeit goods from your store and you are an accessory. This will only change when Amazon are held accountable.

nkkollaw 9y ago

Will they take the product down if you can prove it's stolen..?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

herodotus 9y ago

Knowingly selling stolen goods is not new to the law. In California, selling a stolen item worth less than $500 is a misdemeanour, and carries a maximum penalty of 1 year in prison. I think that if the owner of Amazon were jailed for 1 year (assuming that Amazon is indeed knowingly selling stolen property), then we might see a drastic improvement in how Amazon deals with all sorts of shady sales on their websites.

Laura_McPherson 9y ago

If you think your spouse may be cheating, you can contact phonespyapps01@gmail.com He’s a real hacker and was very reliable in helping me spy on my cheating husband’s cell phone remotely.